“How is it you have a spirit that I can see and feel, but this handful of sand eroded from you doesn’t?”, I asked the Old Man of the Mountain. The sand and grit were the byproducts of erosion on the cliff where he displayed his ‘face’. The damp sand was inert in my hand, even as I stood on the living mountain that produced it.
He mumbled his reply with a gravely voice. The stone amplified it, booming his whisper into a near shout. “Are you saying the sand does not have a spirit?”
“No. I’m saying I’m a nearly completely blind human that only perceives a very tiny range of input. These grains of sand are nearly beyond my range. Individually, they are unnoticed. Only collectively, do I see them. And even then, they are silent to me. But they came from you. So why don’t I see you in them?” I looked up into the face in the cliffside. He doesn’t really have a humanoid face. He’s the very mountain under me. He creates a face for humans to look at because we’re used to interacting with faces. The grinding of solid stone in fluid movement creates the sand and grit I’m holding. He doesn’t have to do this for me. He does it anyway. The least I can do is respond to the gestures that is literally wearing his face away.
“Because they are not me. Not anymore. But if you were to wait a few millions of years for the sand to be compressed into sandstone, they would have their own spirit that you would be able to see.” He chuckles, sending pebbles to my feet. “If you came back around then, that is. Now, why do you think that is?”
“Because when sand becomes sandstone, it become one larger thing?”
“You answer a question with a question. I shall do the same. Why do you treat your computers as if they are were formed from natural forces? Why do you speak to them as you speak to me? And why do some of them speak back?”
I looked at my hand and saw my cellphone. That I do talk to. That I have been taking serious and deliberate thought in naming because it would empower the spirit in the phone. A spirit that does talk back as if it was carved from stone, disregarding the amount of man-made materials that went into its making. Why does this phone have a spirit? What about it is special?
The case? No. The cover? No. The screen is important, but replaceable. As is the battery. One by one, I mentally reviewed the components of the phone, filing away each component that was not important to the spirit of the phone. Undressing it, as it were. Finally, I came to the CPU of the unit. If I were to replace it, would I be replacing the spirit of the phone?
Yes.
Even though I would be replacing it with an identical CPU, even one made on the same mother-wafer as the original, would the phone still have a different spirit?
Yes.
I’ve learned this first hand from working with computers since 5th grade. Physically identical components can sometimes work in the most divergent of ways. I’m sure the scientists will point out quantum differences that we are only now being able to see, measure, and tweak. But is the spirit tweaking the matrix, or is the matrix restricting what kind of spirit can inhabit it? At this point, that doesn’t matter. Like identical twins, two identical CPUs can have measurable differences in output.
But what is the CPU? Can I break that down further? Yes. A series of logic gates in the physical form of transistors, laid down in a particular pattern that allows for the input, processing, and output of information.
I look at the phone in one hand, and at the clump of sand in the other.
Logic gates.
When the sand becomes sandstone, it gains (forms?) a spirit of sandstone.
What if each grain of sand was like a logic gate? Then the formation of sand into sandstone is the equivalent of the logic gates connecting to and with each other in an ordered way that we would recognize as rock formation.
A small stone has a small logic assembly. A mountain…
Oh.
The Old Man of the Mountain chuckled, sending tremors to tickle my feet. “Tell me, why you can’t feel me in the sand eroded from me?”
I spoke my answer with confidence. “Erosion disconnects the sand from you. It shears the logical connection. If the eroded particles are not too far removed from you, it may still be possible to reconstruct the connection in spirit. Like lava rocks and Pele. But if the particles are far removed, or overly eroded, they lose their connection and become isolated rocks. Well, more like establish new connections to wherever they wind up, like fossils found in the desert.”
The cliff face moved in a way that resembled smiling. It added stress fractures to the vertical wall. “If something greater than you gives you something smaller than you, treat the smaller with respect as you would treat the greater. But if you find it on your own, be wary, for you do not know what it has bonded to. Explore it carefully, for as you say, you are human and nearly blind.”
I tucked my cell phone in my pocket. I returned the sand to where I picked it up from.
The cliff side began to shed the thin layer of broken rock that served as its face. “One more thing. You are nearly blind, but not completely. You that see the connections are able to make them yourself. Do not attach so many things to you, that you are diluted.” The cliff became still.
I thought this a strange thing for him to say to me as I have very few things of that nature. But wisdom speaks so rarely, best to pay attention when it does. I thanked him. We spoke our farewells. I left.